In anticipation of getting my restaurant guerrilla marketing book finished in about a month, I was exploring additional ways to get the word out there. Business books are never an easy sell, and for the first two books I wrote last year, I literally did nothing for advertising. This was more a fault of it just being a brain dump of information that I just wanted to put down on paper, rather than a wish to be a well-known author (someday when I finally finish that fiction thriller and get beyond chapter one maybe LOL).
I belong to about a dozen Facebook groups with writers, publishers, aspiring writers and the sometimes overly intrusive vendors who frequent those groups, and Substack kept coming up. As in, if you’re an author (of any vein) you should be on Substack.
Having “heard” of it but literally knowing nothing about the platform, I set an account up and rapidly went WHOA!, this puppy offers a lot for free. I’m still digging around in the back end for all the options and bells and whistles.
From a business perspective, I’d say to businesses, at least check it out. Free newsletter option for unlimited subscribers, including tracking, email a.k.a. blog posts, plus the option to have paid email subscribers (with some gated content) and free podcasting.
Pros:
Posting a blog post is easy, about as easy as using Blogger (owned by Google) blog. I have not yet tested the podcast functions, but it’s on my list and people I have talked to that podcast on it seem to love it.
It gives you the option to add watermarks on any images, which I find useful, and lets you also add alt tags to the images (good for SEO and accessibility).
It gives you stats on open rates, viewers, referral sources, and subscribers, and the time lag for updating stats seems to be around 6 hours.
I do very much like that it gives you “who” specifically opened in email the post for any email subscribers. It also tracks clicks.
Cons:
It took some poking around to go through all the options and figure out things. I could have sped that up quite a bit if I had read the help/support section first, but I tend to like to poke around in things and see how they work because it’s more fun IMO.
SEO value seems negligible to none if you just use the platform “as is”. It gets picked up by Google if you are sharing the posts on other social platforms. I’ve only done five posts so far, and two plus the main page are indexed, so it will be interesting to track SEO value as I do more posts and also enable more exposure to it (below).
I have not yet added it to Google Search Console, set up Google Tag manager, or done a sitemap yet for it and submitted it, but in researching this definitely shows that this “helps” with getting posts and the account indexed.
It does not give you the ability to add categories, tags, or separate keywords to posts like many blogging platforms do.
The layout is pretty basic as is there really isn’t much, think basic formatting options from a MS Word document minus the ability to pick fonts and font size above basic heading size options. You can add a custom visual header to the posts/email newsletter, but customizing the actual blog post/email newsletter is very, very basic. (but it’s free, so there is that). It does allow images, embedded audio and video. I did find it interesting in playing with it a bit that if you wrote a blog post in WordPress for example and then copy the text/images straight from a website into a Substack post it does copy over the text size, formatting and font style. I have not yet tried an actual blog/email to see whether it transfers the formatting through into email, but if it does (and will test) it could be a work around to make the email newsletter/blog post a bit more customized.
If you want to explore Substack, I’d recommend checking out https://substack.com/resources and https://support.substack.com/ (at the bottom of the page: Getting Started on Substack).
Here are the four Guerrilla Marketing Tips I wrote this month for Substack:
Zoom Cameo Challenge
July 29, 2025-Tactical Tuesday: Guerrilla Marketing Tip
https://forfeng.substack.com/p/zoom-cameo-challenge
Spot the Code, Score the Deal
July 22, 2025-Tactical Tuesday: Guerrilla Marketing Tip
https://forfeng.substack.com/p/spot-the-code-score-the-deal
Offer a Coupon Code Hidden in a Puzzle
July 15, 2025-Tactical Tuesday: Guerrilla Marketing Tip
https://forfeng.substack.com/p/offer-a-coupon-code-hidden-in-a-puzzle
Local Landmark Photo Challenge
July 8, 2025-Tactical Tuesday: Guerrilla Marketing Tip
https://forfeng.substack.com/p/local-landmark-photo-challenge
